Start by separating two things that get bundled together. Producing speech, and getting feedback on it. Only the second ever needed another person, and even then not in real time.
What genuinely needs a partner
Not much, honestly.
Unpredictable follow-up questions, where you cannot anticipate the next turn. Real conversational repair, when you are misunderstood and have to fix it live. And the social pressure of a person waiting, which is a real component of exam nerves.
That is the list. Everything else - fluency, range, grammatical complexity, pronunciation, timing, structure - is trainable alone.
Recording yourself is uncomfortable and that is the point
Almost everyone dislikes hearing their own recorded voice. Get past it, because the alternative is practising with no feedback loop at all.
What you will notice in the first recording, reliably: you paused more than you thought, you repeated one word constantly, and you spoke for less time than it felt like. None of those are visible from the inside while talking.
A useful discipline: listen back once without stopping, then once with the transcript. The first pass tells you how you sound. The second tells you why.
Keep the clock honest
The most common self-deception in solo practice is generous timing. Fifteen seconds of thinking before a TOEFL interview answer that allows none. Stopping the Part 2 turn at ninety seconds because it felt complete.
Practice like that builds a version of the skill that does not exist in the exam. The timings are not incidental - the absence of preparation time in the TOEFL interview task is the task, and the two-minute long turn is hard precisely because it is two minutes.
Set the real timer. Be stopped by it.
Short and daily beats long and weekly
Two hours on Sunday feels productive and does less than fifteen minutes a day. Three reasons, and only one of them is about English.
Speaking is a motor skill as much as a knowledge one, and motor skills consolidate with spacing. A correction met once a week is met from scratch each time. And a two-hour session gets cancelled by a busy Sunday, while fifteen minutes survives almost anything.
The version that works for most people: one scored answer on a weekday, one full mock at the weekend. Small enough to survive a bad week, structured enough to accumulate.
Work on one thing at a time
The instinct after a mediocre answer is to fix everything - hesitate less, use better words, more complex grammar, clearer pronunciation. Attempt all four in one two-minute answer and you will manage none, because attention is the constraint rather than knowledge.
Pick one criterion. Answer three questions with only that in mind. Ignore the other three, including when they get slightly worse, which they will. Then check whether the one you chose moved.
This is slower than it sounds and faster than the alternative.
Build the pressure back in deliberately
The one thing solo practice genuinely lacks is another person waiting. Some of it can be reconstructed.
- Practise at the time of day your exam is booked. Speaking performance varies with how long you have been awake and how much you have already talked.
- Do a full mock in one sitting rather than in pieces, so the fatigue is real.
- Stand up. It changes breathing and posture, and it is closer to how a test feels than slumping on a bed.
- Record in one take with no restarts. Allowing yourself a second attempt quietly removes the pressure you are trying to simulate.
When a person is worth it
Not for volume. A tutor is expensive per minute, and using that time to hear you produce answers is spending it on the part you can do alone.
Use it for the things that need a human: unpredictable follow-ups, live repair, and a judgement call on whether an idiom sounds forced. Bring recordings and reports rather than starting cold - a tutor reading a marked-up transcript can spend the whole session on the diagnosis instead of producing it.
Which is a better trade for both of you than another hour of answering questions.